1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a device to measure content and velocity of aqueous and hydrocarbon mixtures in both oil-continuous and water-continuous phases.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are numerous devices on the market which utilize the change in the dielectric constant to determine the amount of water in oil. These devices operate only in the oil-continuous phase, i.e. as long as the mixture behaves like a dielectric. However, as soon as the mixture changes to water-continuous, it stops being an insulator (dielectric) and the instrument indicates 100% water.
Other techniques which utilize optical principles suffer from a lack of sensitivity at the oil-continuous phase and cannot cope with thick oil build-up without frequent cleaning. Changes in the salinity of the water also tend to affect the absolute measurement of such parameters, e.g. refractive index, conductivity, dielectric constant, etc. Nuclear absorption, while giving good results with binary mixtures, are overmasked by heavy metallic contaminants, such as sulfur, vanadium, etc. Particle size in the water-continuous phase also plays an important part and affects the reading greatly.